Friedman Nails It: The Missing “We” in American Society

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman crafted a brilliant, insightful and frightening piece this morning. His headline: “Where Did ‘We’ Go?” He begins by drawing a comparison between the political climate in America today and that immediately preceding the 1995 assassination of Israeli President Yitzak Rabin. The comparison is chilling.

But his central point is summarized in one of the most quotable quotations from a political columnist in recent memory:

Our leaders, even the president, can no longer utter the word “we” with a straight face. There is no more “we” in American politics at a time when “we” have these huge problems — the deficit, the recession, health care, climate change and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that “we” can only manage, let alone fix, if there is a collective “we” at work.

So right. So important. So sad. And as clear and cogent a summary of what’s wrong with America today as any written by the sum total of academics and philosophers in the past 40 years.The 1980s were widely hailed as the “Me Generation,” thanks in large part to the conservative social policies of the Reagan Administration. It seems clear that that generation didn’t go away, it became more pervasive. We now find ourselves forced to answer Rodney King’s famous rhetorical question — “Can’t we all just get along?” — with a disconsolate “No.” Not because it isn’t possible to get along but because there is no more “we” to do the getting.

You can change this. I can change this. You and I can make a new We. And then we can find other “We’s” and make bigger and bigger communities until we finally regain the sense of national interest and purpose that must become the foundation on which we go forward.

One of America’s wisest early citizens, Benjamin Franklin, said, “We must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.” In today’s America, we either begin to pull together or we will pull the very fabric of this nation apart. Putting the threads back together would not be easy. It might even prove impossible.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous

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October 4, 2009 · Posted in Media, Personal, Politics  
　　　　

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